My Album Of The Week for the week of November 25th-December 1st, 2013:
Frankie Teardrop - Tough Guy
A couple of things led to me spending the week with "Tough Guy." First, I was reading Erik Thompsons's excellent Gimme Noise column 10 Twin Cities Music Acts Who Deserve To Be Famous and, continuing the Sisyphian struggle that is keeping up with the Twin Cities music scene, I downloaded whatever albums I could find from the artists in the column.
While all of those albums will likely find their way to Album Of The Week status, Frankie Teardrop jumped to the front of the line when his song "Chicago" was one of the Song Of The Day tracks (meaning I'd be spending the week with it anyway and reviewing it for Songs Of The Week). Rather than spend two weeks with "Chicago" I decided to kill two birds with one stone and just make Tough Guy my album of the week.
After a couple of spins I can't totally tell if the songs of Tough Guy are garage rock songs polished up or pop songs stripped down. More important than that, though, is that the record is fun. Late November is the time of the year when the Twin Cities stops being fun and starts being a city of "serious artists." Listening to an album that ends with a song called "Pizza Lyfestyle" is a nice way to combat that creeping pretension.
Tough Guy is available as a name-your-price download on Frankie Teardrop's Bandcamp page.
